Zakaria: An Arab Spring country passes the 'democracy test'

Are we all happy about this? If not, why not? Because it doesn't fit our paradigm?

Going deeper, Zakaria posits that Tunisia succeeded where Egypt failed not because Tunisia's Islamists were better, but because Tunisia was more modern, literate globalized, urban and better-educated, with stronger civic groups and labor unions:

"And so, there was relative parity between Islamists and their opponents. Tunisia's Islamic parties shared power, in other words, not because it was better than the Muslim Brotherhood [in Egypt] but because it had to. Tunisia had more of the preconditions that have historically helped strengthen democracy than did Egypt." 

Can Arab countries be real democracies?

By Fareed Zakaria 

November 3, 2014 | CNN

Can Arab countries be real democracies? Well, one of them, Tunisia just did well on a big test.

More than twenty years ago, the scholar Samuel Huntington established his famous "two turnover test" for fledgling democracies. He argued that a country can only be said to be a consolidated democracy when there have been TWO peaceful transitions of power.

Tunisia passed Huntington's test after last weekend's election, when – for the second time – a ruling establishment agreed to hand over power. Tunisia's relative success is in marked contrast to the abysmal failure of Egypt, the Arab world’s largest and once most influential country.

As in Tunisia, Egyptians also overthrew a dictator three years ago...but after Egypt's brief experiment with democracy, in which the Muslim Brotherhood was elected and then abused its authority, today the country is ruled by a repressive dictatorship.

Zakaria: What's really wrong with the Middle East

This analysis by Zakaria is must-read stuff for everybody, but especially my dear conservative friends who are all ginned up for another open-ended U.S. troop engagement in the Middle East -- this time to fight ISIS.

On talk radio I am hearing supremely ignorant and stupid stuff that boils down to plain xenophobia anti-Muslim rhetoric. These conservative talking heads conflate ISIS, al Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as if they are all one organization working in cahoots with grand, global aims. They only get away with such balderdash because of Americans' ignorance and eagerness to believe the worst about all Arabs and Muslims.  

Why they still hate us, 13 years later

By Fareed Zakaria

September 5, 2014 | Washington Post

Watching the gruesome execution videos, I felt some of the same emotions I did after 9/11. Barbarism is designed to provoke anger, and it succeeded. But in September 2001, it also made me ask, “Why do they hate us?” I tried to answer that question in an essay for Newsweek that struck a chord with readers. I reread it to see what I got right and wrong and what I’ve learned in the past 13 years.

It’s not just al-Qaeda. I began by noting that Islamic terrorism is not the isolated behavior of a handful of nihilists. There is a broader culture that has been complicit or at least unwilling to combat it. Things have changed on this front but not nearly enough.

It’s not an Islam problem but an Arab problem. In the early 2000s, Indonesia was our biggest concern because of a series of terrorist attacks there after 9/11. But over the past decade, jihad and even Islamic fundamentalism have not done well in Indonesia — the largest Muslim country in the world, larger in that sense than Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya and the Gulf states put together. Or look at India, which is right next door to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s headquarters in Pakistan, but very few of its 165 million Muslims are members of al-Qaeda. Zawahiri has announced a bold effort to recruit Indian Muslims, but I suspect it will fail.

Arab political decay. The central point of the essay was that the reason the Arab world produces fanaticism and jihad is political stagnation. By 2001, almost every part of the world had seen significant political progress — Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, even Africa had held many free and fair elections. But the Arab world remained a desert. In 2001, most Arabs had fewer freedoms than they did in 1951.

The one aspect of life that Arab dictators could not ban was religion, so Islam had become the language of political opposition. As the Westernized, secular dictatorships of the Arab world failed — politically, economically and socially — the fundamentalists told the people, “Islam is the solution.”

The Arab world was left with dictatorships on one hand and deeply illiberal opposition groups on the other — Hosni Mubarak or al-Qaeda. The more extreme the regime, the more violent the opposition. This cancer was deeper and more destructive than I realized. Despite the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and despite the Arab Spring, this dynamic between dictators and jihadis has not been broken.

Look at Syria, where, until recently, Bashar al-Assad actually had been helping the Islamic State by buying oil and gas from it and shelling its opponents, the Free Syrian Army, when the two were battling each other. Assad was playing the old dictator’s game, giving his people a stark choice — it’s either me or the Islamic State. And many Syrians (the Christian minority, for example) have chosen him.

The greatest setback has been in Egypt, where a nonviolent Islamist movement took power and squandered its chance by overreaching. But not content to let the Muslim Brotherhood fail at the polls, the army displaced it by force and moved back into power. Egypt is now a more brutal police state than it was under Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned, many of its members killed or jailed, the rest driven underground. Let’s hope that ,10 years from now, we do not find ourselves discussing the causes of the rise of an Islamic State in Egypt.

What did I miss in that essay 13 years ago? The fragility of these countries. I didn’t recognize that if the dictatorships faltered, the state could collapse, and that beneath the state there was no civil society — nor, in fact, a real nation. Once chaos reigned across the Middle East, people reached not for their national identities — Iraqi, Syrian — but for much older ones: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd and Arab.

I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial — but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria.

Beinart: Cheney openly disparages 'Bush Doctrine'

Here's recent revisionist history, revised by the guy who recently made history, Dick Cheney! Peter Beinart explains [emphasis mine]:

It’s worth recognizing how directly Cheney is repudiating Bush’s vision. Bush’s core point—repeated by a thousand supportive pundits—was that when Middle Eastern dictators don’t allow democratic dissent, jihadist terrorism becomes the prime avenue for resistance. Egypt today is a textbook example. The Muslim Brotherhood won a free vote. In power, it ruled in illiberal ways. But Egypt was still due for additional elections in which people could do just what Bush had urged them to: express their grievances democratically. Instead, the military seized on popular discontent to overthrow the government, massively repress freedom of speech, and engineer a sham election. And just as Bush predicted, Egypt’s Islamists are responding by moving toward violence and jihadist militancy.

But it’s Cheney’s view, not Bush’s, that is ascendant on today’s right.  It’s now common to hear hawkish pundits declare that Brotherhood parties should be barred from running anywhere in the Middle East, which represents a full embrace of the authoritarian-stability argument that Bush devoted his second inaugural to arguing against.

Because Obama’s rhetoric about freedom and democracy is less soaring than Bush’s, the media often calls him a realist.  But as Obama’s Egypt policy shows, he’s actually proved far more willing to risk relationships with dictatorial American clients than most of his conservative critics would like.

Obama’s foreign policy is only “realist” in comparison to the vision Bush laid out in 2005—a vision now being trashed widely in his own party.  If there remains any significant faction in today’s Republican Party willing to risk America’s relationships with friendly Arab tyrants in the name of democracy, it is headquartered in Dallas, where a former president seems content to express himself merely through art.

Real historians will be studying Dick Cheney for decades. They'll eventually decide, I predict, that he was a malicious influence in the White House who parroted his President's foreign policy line when he couldn't get his way, while seeking to undermine it in practice. Now Cheney is repudiating Dubya out in the open. 

I for one agree that democratization is the only future for the Middle East, but that means Saudi Arabia, firstly, and then Egypt, Iran, Israel and Turkey. The rest will follow suit. But democracy can't be established at the point of a U.S. gun -- especially when it must be preceded by national liberation. Recent experience has asserted, once again, that national liberation is primarily the job of those who would be liberated. (And we're talking about countries that were drawn up by outside Western powers; the people inside those borders might not agree with those lines).  The U.S. can assist only at the fringes.

Dick Cheney Just Buried the Bush Doctrine

By Peter Beinart

June 27, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/dick-cheney-just-buried-the-bush-doctrine/373621/

U.S. foreign policy must be moral as well as prudent

This entire op-ed by Harvard professor Joseph Nye is worth reading. I especially liked his comparison of Bush 41 vs. Bush 43 [emphasis mine]:

When we cannot be sure how to improve the world, prudence becomes an important virtue, and grandiose visions can pose a grave danger. This is sometimes forgotten by those who want Obama to place bigger bets in the revolutions of today’s Middle East. It is one thing to try to nudge events at the margins and assert our values in the long term; it is another to think we can shape revolutions we do not fully understand. There is a difference between a limited punishment of Syria for breaking an international taboo on the use of chemical weapons and becoming involved in a civil war. In foreign policy, as in medicine, it is important to first do no harm. Bush 41, who lacked the ability to articulate a vision but was able to steer through crises, turned out to be a better leader than his son, who had a powerful vision but little contextual intelligence about the region he tried to reshape.

Definitely I agree with Nye that prudence is the word of the day -- of the decade -- in U.S. foreign policy.  We'll be paying for Dubya's imprudence in Afghanistan and Iraq for decades to come. What I disagree with is Nye's America-first view on foreign policy that naturally gives U.S. presidents the right or the option to intervene militarily wherever they wish, as long as their "big bets" show promising odds of success over there -- success as defined by us, over here. 

What Nye and others don't realize is that we are in a new era, a new wave of democratization, now continuing in the Arab-Muslim world. The arc of history bends toward democracy. The U.S. has played no small role in that. (Pat self on back). So anybody straining against that arc will feel the pain, eventually. That goes for the U.S. at home or interfering abroad.

Egypt offers preliminary evidence that Arab-Muslims refuse to go back to dictatorship.  They've had a taste of revolution and they liked it.  Certainly I disagree with the way the Egyptian military with the support of some Egyptians ousted the democratically elected President Morsi, even while I sympathize with their grievances against him.  The street protests of an active urban minority proved very effective, but it was hardly democratic or representative of the wishes of 84 million Egyptians.  Nevertheless, what did we immediately see thereafter? The Egyptian military promised fresh elections.  We'll see if the generals follow through on their promise -- and the U.S. should pressure them hard to do so -- or if the interim government will ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a political party. Nevertheless, the point is that a "new normal" has been established: elections, democracy.  Baby steps.  

Hence, Nye rightly reminds America to think of revolutions in terms of decades, not weeks or years, and to "first do no harm."  But Nye is old-fashioned in his chauvinistic belief that the U.S. can intervene boldly in other nation's affairs and still be lucky enough to avoid blowback.  No.  The world has changed. Everything happening everywhere is known to everybody; and small voices can have huge ripple effects in unexpected places.  Like our back yard.

More importantly, we must graciously accept that the international institutions of peace, national sovereignty and democracy that America helped to build in the 20th century increasingly constrain U.S. foreign policy options as they gather power and widespread recognition. That is a good thing for everybody, the U.S. included. We shouldn't struggle against those reassuring bonds; we shouldn't strain to unbend that just arc.

What I'm getting at, finally, is a plea for a moral foreign policy based on U.S values.  Yes, really and truly.  Not just words to that effect, but deeds. That is the way.  

Many will say I'm naive.  But I say: isn't it in fact naive to think anymore, post-911, that we can make agreements with dictators and hope to maintain control, through them, over millions of angry and oppressed people?  People with access to the Internet, and weapons, and relatives, friends and sympathizers all over the world?  OK, maybe for a while.  But then what?  All that anger will burst forth eventually... and do we really want to bear the brunt of it?  

No.  We must be respected by the people of the world, and not just their leaders.  And we can do that only by leading with our values that we believe are universal (and in fact God-given) and that lead to the greater happiness of all mankind.  If we really believe that, and we're right, then America should prevail.  If we only pay lip service to our values outside U.S. borders, or think they are only for white Christians surrounded by two oceans, then... By all means, let's rely on old-fashioned realpolitik and brute force to get what we want.  But then we shouldn't be shocked or outraged when others resent us or even try to kill us in response; and no more asking ourselves, then, in a pitiful mockery of self-reflection, Why do they hate us?

The foreign policy risk behind the Arab revolutions

By Joseph S. Nye Jr.

August 31, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/17sysWe

Gingrich: Neocons may now be non-interventionist

Gee, whaddya know?  Maybe old neocons can learn new tricks!

I wonder though if Newt's change of mind could have anything to do with shifting political winds on the Far Right -- Newt's political provenance and final refuge -- towards libertarian isolationism?   

I do have a bone to pick with Gingrich's aside that, "[W]e really need a discussion on what is an effective policy against radical Islam, since it’s hard to argue that our policies of the last 12 years have [sic] effective."

How does one measure our effectiveness?  No more 9/11s?  Number of Americans killed?  Number of attacks by Islamists, period?  Number of Islamist terrorists killed?  What's the metric?  Whatever it is, I'd argue we've been doing pretty well.  (You can find a data base of 40 years of terror attacks against the U.S. here.)

One could certainly argue that America's means of fighting terrorism -- drone strikes, domestic spying, sanctioned murders, renditions and torture in secret prisons, etc. -- exceed the scale of the threat we face, and do more harm than good.

But more important, we non-interventionist liberals must part ways with the Gingrichs, Pauls and Cruzes when they continue to state, all too casually, that the U.S. is at war with Islam.  We are not even "at war" with radical Islam.  We're not at war with anybody, constitutionally or operationally speaking.  It's possible to argue we're not even fighting al Qaeda anymore.  Needless to say, we must continue to seek out, thwart and kill or arrest those who threaten to attack, or attempt to attack and kill us.  Period.  

Declaring war on a whole religion or a religious sect is stupid and self-defeating.  Four hundred years of Christian Crusades against Muslims followed by 120 years of war between Catholics and Protestants should have taught the West as much.  

Radical Islam, whether home-grown or foreign, is not a threat to America, a priori or sine exceptione.  And terrorism is not an enemy that we can fight a war against.  

We Democrats and liberals must not sanction stupid bumper-sticker generalizations about the world that lead America into trouble.  

UPDATE (08.12.2013): The American Prospect ran an article on August 9 on the same topic, making many of the same points I did: "Neocons vs. Non-Interventionists: Let the Games Begin!"  If the GOP is going to have a debate on foreign policy, I predict it will be quiet and internal.

Newt Gingrich rethinks neoconservative views on U.S. military interventions

By Ralph Z. Hallow

August 4, 2013 | Washington Times

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a leading neoconservative hawk and staunch supporter of Israel, says the U.S. military interventions he has long supported to promote democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere have backfired and need to be re-evaluated.

“I am a neoconservative. But at some point, even if you are a neoconservative, you need to take a deep breath to ask if our strategies in the Middle East have succeeded,” the 2012 Republican presidential hopeful said in an interview.

Mr. Gingrich supported the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he said he has increasingly doubted the strategy of attempting to export democracy by force to countries where the religion and culture are not hospitable to Western values.

“It may be that our capacity to export democracy is a lot more limited than we thought,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich at times has expressed doubts about the U.S. capacity for nation-building, but he said he now has formed his own conclusions about their failures in light of the experiences of the past decade.

“My worry about all this is not new,” Mr. Gingrich said. “But my willingness to reach a conclusion is new.”

Mr. Gingrich said it is time for Republicans to heed some of the anti-interventionist ideas offered by the libertarian-minded Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, tea party favorite and foreign policy skeptic.

“I think it would be healthy to go back and war-game what alternative strategies would have been better, and I like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul because they are talking about this,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Mr. Paul, a longtime critic of neoconservatives on foreign policy, argues that war must be a last resort and never should be used for nation-building.

In a June 24 column in The Washington Times, Mr. Paul wrote that Americans were told for many years that the radical Taliban would return to power quickly unless U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan.

“Well, guess what, after 12 years, trillions of dollars, more than 2,200 Americans killed, and perhaps more than 50,000 dead Afghan civilians and fighters, the Taliban is coming back anyway!” Mr. Paul wrote.

He noted a similar pattern of radical resurgence in Iraq after American forces withdrew.

As far back as December 2003, Mr. Gingrich was questioning the follow-up for the successful U.S. invasion.

“I am very proud of what [Operation Iraqi Freedom commander Gen.] Tommy Franks did — up to the moment of deciding how to transfer power to the Iraqis. Then we go off a cliff,” he told Newsweek magazine. He said the point should have been “not ‘How many enemy do I kill?’, [but] ‘How many allies do I grow?’”

He also noted his past wariness about U.S. military interventions, often telling audiences that “we could directly guarantee democracy in Iraq and not stay a day longer than needed in Korea.” “Korea has been a 63-year engagement,” he added with a laugh.

Mr. Gingrich argued less than two years ago that President Obama should have “quietly tried to push” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak out of office.

But he now questions whether even U.S. indirect intervention in Egypt to back the overthrow of the longtime Egyptian leader and U.S. ally might have been a mistake. “Here’s a simple question: ‘Is Egypt really better off than going back to Mubarak since it’s hard to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood’s dictatorship is better than Mubarak?’” Mr. Gingrich said.

The former speaker added that U.S. military action in Syria would risk a repeat of interventionist foreign policy mistakes.

“I explicitly would not go into Syria,” he said. “I would look at the whole question of how we think of the governments in other countries,” he said.

He said the result may be another military dictatorship in Egypt and that would be better than rule by the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

“It’s hard to argue the chaos in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Lebanon make for a better future,” Mr. Gingrich said.

The fear of many in the United States and Israel is that the Arab Spring is bringing not Western-style democracy but simply replacing secular authoritarians with militantly Islamic religious governments that are hostile to Israel and the U.S., he said.

“I certainly would have allied myself in the 1970s and 1980s with the strategy of intervention and defeating the Soviet Union, but there is definitely a reflection point for conservatives and Republican Party leaders on how we have approached our major national security questions,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I am not alone in asking the question: ‘Are we making progress after the Arab Spring?’”

A top official in the George W. Bush administration, which oversaw the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and occupations, offered partial agreement with Mr. Gingrich.

“People want to know if Gingrich has really changed his opinion — his point of view — because if he has it will make an impact,” said former Bush political director Matt Schlapp.

“There are plenty of conservatives and Republicans who think that those decisions to go into Afghanistan and Iraq were overly aggressive,” said Mr. Schlapp. “But I believe the vast majority of Republicans are hoping these life-and-death decisions we made in Afghanistan and Iraq were the right decisions to combat terrorism.”

Mr. Gingrich said the U.S. “should begin to focus narrowly on American interests” rather than on attempting to change systems of governance abroad to our liking.

“I think we really need a discussion on what is an effective policy against radical Islam, since it’s hard to argue that our policies of the last 12 years have effective,” he said.

Mr. Gingrich repeated comments he expressed in an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio show supporting Mr. Paul in his extended contretemps with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a fellow Republican. Mr. Christie sharply criticized what he called the “esoteric, intellectual debates” he said Mr. Paul and his allies were staging in the face of the need for stronger security polices in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I consistently have been on the side of having the courage that Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have, and I think it’s sad to watch the establishment grow hysterical, but, frankly, they’re hysterical because they have no answers,” Mr. Gingrich said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Mr. Gingrich predicted that Mr. Christie’s attack was the “first sign” of more to come from the party’s foreign policy establishment.

“The establishment will grow more and more hysterical the more powerful Rand Paul and Ted Cruz become,” Mr. Gingrich said. “They will gain strength as it’s obvious that they are among the few people willing to raise the right questions.”

Assange: 'Don't be evil' is banal cover for Google's sucking up to Power

You might recall that I was also critical and skeptical of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's vision for a brave, new world of digital technology all up in our junk. Unlike myself, Julian Assange bothered to read Schmidt's entire book.  Assange argues that Google has actively volunteered to become an important part of the U.S. Government's power apparatus.

I have to say I like this Assange guy, despite his somewhat sneering, sissy looks and such conflicting accounts about him.  He certainly has a singular and iconoclastic view on the world that is lacking.  Nowadays those who distrust government become conspiracy nuts.  And they get lumped in with real thinkers and critics like Assange.  But there is a difference between Government and Power.  Power certainly has a home in government but it also has residences in business, academia, the media and NGOs.  It's too easy to blame Big Government for the overreaching influence of Power.  

Also, anti-government conspiracy nuts don't bother to do their homework and make the real connections that are there to be seen in the public domain because these relationships are so well-respected and indeed banal (to borrow a word from Assange). That is what WikiLeaks did, essentially: it confirmed what we had already suspected, what we already knew but chose to ignore. Instead nuts invent unreal connections and draw false conclusions from them.  

What is known and real is bad enough, there are no fake conspiracies required!  

I also questioned Google's practice of cooperating so easily with the FBI's so-called National Security Letters that request, without a warrant, the electronic information of Google's users.  Google wasn't allowed to say how many NSLs there have been, but they said they've tripled in the past four years.  Why?  And since when do we let the government use private business to spy on us, legally?  Thank the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Patriot Act; but thank our apathy and ignorance most of all.  

Finally, a word about terrorism. Unlike most problems, I think the solution here is to ignore it.  Just pretend it doesn't exist. OK, I'm exaggerating a bit: our law enforcement bodies should try catch and foil terrorists; but it's not something our politicians or citizens should give much thought to, much less debate.  It's such a statistically insignificant problem, it merits as much attention in our public discourse and private worries as, say, West Nile virus, which, incidentally, killed 286 Americans in 2012, as opposed to Islamist terrorism which killed... zero.  That's right, none on American soil.  And yet the fight against Islamist terror costs $ trillions a year and terrible intrusions into our privacy!  Consider the absurdity of it!

The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’

By Julian Assange

June 1, 2013 | New York Times

“The New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.

The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now — only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth.  Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.

The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that “the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal.” Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be “easier to start” but “harder to finish.” Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be “no more springs” (but China is on the ropes).

The authors fantasize about the future of “well resourced” revolutionary groups. A new “crop of consultants” will “use data to build and fine-tune a political figure.”

“His” speeches (the future isn’t all that different) and writing will be fed “through complex feature-extraction and trend-analysis software suites” while “mapping his brain function,” and other “sophisticated diagnostics” will be used to “assess the weak parts of his political repertoire.”

The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. It avoids meaningful criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, quite extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement, which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead to the region’s “aging leaders,” the book can’t see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets theatrically over Washington’s favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.

Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.

Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so “The Future of Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush.

I have a very different perspective. The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.

The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself.

The writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, “allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.” But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends.

The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include “the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.” One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.

Only an elite can secure the gains of revolution

I'm not a fan of Anne Applebaum but she makes a good point here, one that I have already mentioned:

As the Arab Spring nations mark their second anniversaries, it’s worth keeping this [post-Soviet] precedent in mind. True, there were dissenters of many kinds in pre-revolutionary Egypt, as one expert told Foreign Policy this week. But “they were largely suppressed, except for the mosque and the soccer pitch. With these two institutions, the numbers were too big and the emotions they evoked were too strong.” The result: The Muslim Brotherhood was the only political “party” with any organizational capacity after 2011. And Egyptian soccer clubs are the only organizations that can reliably be counted on to create major protests, as they have recently. Another alternative elite was not available.

The upshot is that positive change in the Mideast and North Africa is going to take many years, because the erstwhile regimes there brutally suppressed the formation of any kind of local elite, and a civil society in which they could exchange ideas and cooperate:

After all, the time to help create an alternative [in Arab Spring countries] was three, five or, better yet, 10 years ago. But even then, an authentic alternative elite couldn’t have been wholly created on the outside, by exiles or by foreigners: If opposition leaders aren’t the product of an indigenous impulse to create alternative institutions — political parties, charities, newspapers, human rights organizations — then they won’t have the political clout to push through radical reforms when they get the chance. Yet in many Arab states, the opportunity to start doing so arrived only in 2011, and the alternative elite is forming only now.

We Americans especially like to believe the myth that revolutions are mass endeavors. The truth is that our American Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and others were carried out by a minority of the population led by a tiny, well-educated, well-connected elite. The People always need leaders -- especially people trying to move on after bad leaders.

Preparing for freedom before it comes

By Anne Applebaum

February 7, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/XXLMuB

Is Obama too soft on Syria?

Do you think Syria will even come up in tomorrow night's Presidential campaign debate?  If Romney criticizes Obama, it can only be for being "too soft" on Syria and President Assad.  Knowing Romney, he'll probably just leave it at that: an accusation without any supporting facts.

It doesn't seem to me that Americans -- Republicans included -- are clamoring for a third war right now... and the cleanup, occupation, institution-building and development aid in Syria that would come with it (Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule).  

I don't even hear people besides John McCain and the neocons saying we should arm Syria's rebel militias.  Again, the memory of arming the Taliban in Afghanistan is pretty fresh.  And it would give Putin a green light to arm Assad.  Then we'd be fighting a proxy war with Russia, who has more skin in this game than we do.

Chickenhawks like Jackson Diehl, cooped up at their desks in DC, will have to wait a decade or so until Americans forget how hard it is to pick winners in a civil war, then occupy the country to make sure the winner does the "correct" things.

How Obama bungled the Syrian revolution

By Jackson Diehl

October 15, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/OBPZWe

Wisdom, not weakness

I hate to direct anybody to V.D. Hanson's stupid commentary on U.S. foreign policy, yet he represents the highest grade of right-wing garbage out there, so I might as well take him down.

It's hard to understand what he is criticizing Obama for, exactly.  For being too soft, certainly.  But on whom?  On Qaddafi?  Oops.  On Syria's Bashar Assad?  Well, they won't come out and say we should start a war with Syria, so what then?  Arm Assad's opponents?  Oops: blowback from angry students is one thing; blowback from armed militants is another.  So that leave us only with more finger-wagging in Assad's general direction.

Or is Obama being too soft on mobs of Arab street protesters?  If so, how could he "get tough" on them?  By bombing them?  By infiltrating them with our spies?  By arming police with tear gas and riot gear?  I'm sure that would calm them down; no blowback potential there, oops.  Then what should Obama do?  More finger-wagging again?

Or, take the recent brutal murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya.  Obama said he would track down the killers and bring them to justice, which sounds pretty tough to me.  (And this President actually tracks down killers.)  Hanson and others criticize Obama for an "absence of adequate military security" in Benghazi.  Fair enough.  But isn't that a technical, not a policy, issue?  The U.S. had no diplomatic presence in Libya for years, and so our embassy outposts there have not yet been well-developed.  Moreover, being a diplomat in a war-torn country is a dangerous job; that's what they signed up for. Just like serving in Afghanistan and Iraq is a dangerous job, to which 6,611 U.S. military fatalities there to-date somberly attest.  (V.D. Hanson can claim his share of intellectual credit for putting them there.)

Here's how Obama explained, before the UN on September 25, why he did what he did:

We intervened in Libya alongside a broad coalition and with the mandate of the United Nations Security Council, because we had the ability to stop the slaughter of innocents and because we believed that the aspirations of the people were more powerful than a tyrant. 

And as we meet here, we again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end so that the suffering of the Syrian people can stop and a new dawn can begin. 

We have taken these positions because we believe that freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture. 

These are not simply American values or Western values; they are universal values. 

American values?  That kind of talk drives blood-and-guts neocons like Hanson to tears.  Values never gave anybody a hard-on.  

This is all child's play relative to deadly-serious nuclear tensions between the U.S. and Iran, yet Hanson and the Right's criticism of Obama is pretty much the same: Obama is too soft.  OK, what should Obama do then?  Start a third preemptive war in 10 years that would suck in the entire Middle East and send the price of gas sky-high?  Don't like that, you say?  OK, what then?  Yet more finger-wagging?  Oops, it sounds like Obama just did that at the UN:  

Make no mistake:  A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained.  It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy.  It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

The simple truth is that Hanson and his fellow disgraced neocons have no new ideas, they blew their load in Iraq, and now they long for the good ole' days when our President was a gullible gorilla who liked to grunt and beat his chest, and who would ape whatever they whispered in his ear.  The days when a few craven and dependent dictators like Qaddafi and Mubarak might pay attention.

You see, America's super-muscular military might is only effective against regimes, not against oppressed people who have nothing to lose, and already live in privation and terror. U.S. military power cannot secure their health, their dignity, or a job.  Therefore, neocons like Hanson want America to maintain friendly but autocratic foreign regimes.  Without regimes to threaten or pay off, Hanson and Co. have nothing to offer. 

The more difficult truth is that there is nothing "weak" about America's reading the writing on the wall and adjusting.  Sooner or later, Qaddafi and Mubarak were going down.  Sooner or later, Assad will too.  Yes, these Devils We Knew provided some comfort and stability to us in a region we don't understand and don't really care to.  But as these devils come under attack by their own oppressed people, it would be stupid and pointless -- and contrary to our stated values -- for us to stand alone against a tide of self-determination.  Obama should be applauded for not standing behind dictators who were about to fall, vainly propping them up a bit longer.  That was not weakness on his part, it was wisdom.

Finally, the most difficult truth for some Americans is that we cannot direct world events like pieces on a chess board, especially and increasingly not by military means.  We can't (and don't want to, I hope) stop some moron for posting an amateurish film on YouTube; just like we can't stop street protests in more than 20 countries as a result of it.  We shouldn't try.  And we shouldn't wring our hands over our "powerlessness."  Only when all people enjoy liberty will the real work of U.S. diplomacy begin: then they, not their oppressors, will decide whether they stand with the United States.  Meanwhile, we must have faith that our cherished values will prevail, and speak with confidence and consistency about them to the ignorant and the skeptical.  The alternative has been tried... and failed.

President Ethelred 

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 25, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328332/president-ethelred-victor-davis-hanson

On Romney's big foreign aid speech

Romney: "If you teach a man to catch a fish this big..."

Mitt Romney's "big foreign aid speech" in New York yesterday took a lot of U.S. rightwing ideological claptrap and imposed it on nations, and a group of aid professionals, that he obviously doesn't understand.

Take, for example, Romney's work requirement to receive U.S. foreign aid, as if developing countries were filled with lazy welfare recipients sitting on their couches, (or their dirt floors as they case may be), waiting for the U.S. to feed them:

Work. That must be at the heart of our effort to help people build economies that can create jobs for people, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem. It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work will not long tolerate corruption nor quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hard-working men and women.

How insulting and stupid!  We're talking about nations where "Work or Starve" isn't the Tea Party's campaign slogan, it's their everyday reality. These people need Romney's lectures on the importance of hard work like they need to learn the importance of food.  Neither do they need his hollow injunctions to overthrow their corrupt leaders: easy for you to say from New York, Mitt!  

(UPDATE: A friend of mine said I was taking Romney's words out of context; he was just emphasizing job creation. Maybe so. But the context of his speech in the campaign was what mattered. Development professionals know that the U.S. Government's economic growth programs have emphasized job creation -- often with hard-number job targets -- for decades now.  But average U.S. voters may not.  Hence, Romney's speech gave the false impression that foreign assistance is broken and needs a "new Sheriff in town" to fix it. Thus my criticism of his stating the obvious as if it was something novel is entirely valid.)

In fact, Romney openly regrets the Arab Spring, when people in the Middle East and North Africa proved they would no longer "tolerate corruption nor quietly endure the brazen theft by government."  So, oppressed people of the world, you should realize that Romney's injunction to throw off your yoke of tyranny comes with an asterisk, if you're Muslim.

Next, Romney repeated the commonly-held but wrong view that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the answer to every nation's economic prayers:

We will focus our efforts on small and medium-size businesses. Microfinance has been an effective tool at promoting enterprise and prosperity, but we must expand support to small and medium-size businesses that are too large for microfinance, but too small for traditional banks.

Indeed, in the U.S. and abroad, more and better jobs are created by larger companies, not small (and especially informal) businesses.  And microfinance has a mixed record of success at best, placing many in the developing world in a cycle of dependency on usurious short-term loans to survive and operate their micro-enterprises.  Yet it is a matter of faith on the Left and Right that small business creates all the jobs and wealth.  What the developing world could really use is Big Corporations, er, Big People, investing their big money and offering locals high-paying jobs and innovative technologies. It's too bad that Romney didn't offer any bright ideas from his big business experience on how to accomplish that. (His plans would probably involve massive U.S. layoffs and offshore banks.)

Next, Romney offered us this epiphany: free enterprise is good.  And he said it in such a way to imply that U.S. foreign aid to-date has been about throwing free food and stacks cash off the back of trucks:

A temporary aid package can jolt an economy.  It can fund some projects.  It can pay some bills.  It can employ some people some of the time.  But it can’t sustain an economy—not for long.  It can’t pull the whole cart—because at some point, the money runs out.  But an assistance program that helps unleash free enterprise creates enduring prosperity. 

Gee, really?  This is a variation on the "teach a man to fish" bromide.  First, most aid projects aren't nearly big enough to "jolt" an economy, much less "sustain" it, not for any period of time!  Second, we got Mitt's memo about 40 years ago. Seriously. The foreign aid straw man he is knocking down doesn't exist. Absolutely nobody in the foreign aid world thinks the opposite of what Romney said. Third, this is so silly and condescending to people who have been working on institutional, legislative and regulatory reform in developing nations to "unleash free enterprise" and "enduring prosperity."  Romney should shut up and listen to them!

Finally, we should admit that a lot of foreign aid is just a roundabout payout to U.S. industries.  For instance, U.S. military aid to Egypt (which is 5x greater than all other forms of aid) goes into the pockets of U.S. defense contractors, while it's arguable whether Egypt needs such a well-equipped army.  And food aid is purchased from U.S. farmers, whether or not it's the best way to fight hunger. Meanwhile, as a result of U.S. lobbying, since 1986 the Bumpers Amendment has forbidden U.S. foreign assistance from helping developing nations to increase agricultural commodities that might compete with U.S. crop exports, free enterprise be damned. This is not to mention long-standing "Buy America" clauses in U.S. foreign assistance contracts that make U.S. aid much more expensive to deliver. As a result of this and more, a certain degree of ineffectiveness is built into our foreign aid architecture by Congress.

Overall, Romney's tone was just wrong, and his content was either obvious or needlessly inflammatory. It is now apparent that, similar to Dubya, Romney sees a world of friendly vs. unfriendly nations; free vs. unfree markets; and corrupt vs. non-corrupt.  And based on those categorizations, Romney wants to decide who gets foreign aid assistance.  (N.B.: Dubya already tried this.)

Yes, there is a strong connection between those things and poverty.  That's why the U.S. has supported democracy, human rights and good governance for years now. The trouble is, in unfriendly, unfree and corrupt nations, everyday people aren't allowed to write the laws and make the rules.  Thus, by withholding our development assistance, including technical assistance (i.e. teaching them to fish), which is mostly what we provide nowadays, we would punish average citizens for their leaders' avarice and myopia.  That would not only be unfair to them, it'd be counter-productive to Romney's stated aims. 

Moreover, foreign assistance is often the only direct contact the U.S. Government has with people living in corrupt, unfree, and/or oppressive countries. If we revoke it then we have only finger-wagging and threats to communicate with them, which average people overseas probably won't even hear. Foreign assistance is not just about "effectiveness" in alleviating poverty; it is soft-power diplomacy to demonstrate our commitment to our cherished values.  

To his credit, Romney did note that the U.S. contributes about 25 percent of global foreign aid, and spends twice as much on foreign assistance as any other country. But he didn't mention that America also accounts for 41 percent of the world's military spending, or about 5 times as much as our nearest rival, China.  In budget terms, 1 percent goes to foreign aid vs. 20 percent to the U.S. military.  Is a 20:1 ratio of "guns to butter" in achieving U.S. foreign policy aims indeed out of whack, and in which direction?  Romney has gone on record to increase U.S. military spending; and it looks like foreign aid is under threat.  So clearly, Romney thinks that ratio should be even more disbalanced.    

Romney has made the choice pretty stark.  Now it's up to informed Americans to decide.